Feels and Emojis Shared at DataHouse Brown Bag Series Tech Talk

Bryan Switalski and Scott Fujieda were featured in last week’s Brown Bag Series, a tech talk event hosted by DataHouse.

The tech talk challenge

Each speaker shared a pecha kucha style presentation on a topic of their choice. Pecha kucha is a challenge where speakers are limited to short concise 6-minute presentations on a singular topic. Each presentation consists of twenty slides with the presenter having just twenty seconds to speak on each one.

Balancing Emotion and Practicality

To kick off the event, Scott Fujieda (DataHouse) began with a presentation titled, “Feels Over Reals” about how to find the balance of emotion and practicality. Scott shared with us about his own personal journey of emotion and vulnerability, and gave insights to how our feelings effect our personal and business decisions.

“It boils down to trust and how we foster relationships where we trust one another to create environments where we feel safe,” Scott explained. “Eventually the goal is to get people talking about what motivates them, and the true reasons for how they behave and make decisions. Understanding yourself helps you better understand others, and the more people are willing to engage at that level, the better we collaborate, solve problems, and make better decisions.”

“I think we are far too critical of ourselves -this jams the creative process and stops us from making cool stuff.” Said Bryan. “If we can silence our inner judgmental critic, it frees us up to receive healthy external feedback, which can be catalytic to a better product.”

“LocalMoji” is an iPhone-exclusive emoji sticker app. The Hawaii inspired app allows users to visually enhance their emotive text message conversations with different zany pineapple emoji characters. One of his collaborations include an Island Ninja emoji, partnering with local and national celebrity, Grant McCartney, known as “Island Ninja” on NBC’s American Ninja Warrior.